The present invention relates generally to hair treatment, dressing or styling devices, and particularly to devices which are snap-lockable around one or more strands of hair to permit isolation and treatment thereof.
There is an ever-present need for hair dressing aids which simplify treatment and reduce the time required to treat hair, especially treatments such as frosting and streaking where only selected portions of the hair are to be styled.
It is a well-known practice to utilize perforated rubber caps which are placed over a person's head, and where the hair strands are then indiscriminately pulled through the holes with a hooked instrument. While this technique has realized a certain degree of commercial success it is nonetheless a very painful experience when the cap is removed as it must be pulled over the many strands of hair. Once the cap is removed, it is very difficult to touch-up hair strands which were missed or incompletely colored. Another shortcoming of the perforated cap is that the hair strands to be colored or otherwise treated must be those which lie immediately below the perforated holes. Since the holes are uniformly distributed over the surface of the cap no provision is made for increasing the number of strands treated per unit area, nor for treating only a portion of the strands.
It is also known in the art that hair strands can be selectively isolated by wrapping metal foil strips therearound. This method also is somewhat effective, but suffers the disadvantage that it is extremely time consuming and the foil tends to loosen unless secured therearound by a rubberband, which only adds to the time and complexity of the styling operation.
Other hair styling devices include the hair straightening clamp of U.S. Pat. No. D. 207,146 which discloses elongate members hingeable along adjacent elongate edges and clampable together around hair strands with no less than four separate locking elements used to keep the clamp attached to the strands of hair. The obvious disadvantage of such device is that each locking element must be individually applied and removed--a very time consuming procedure when perhaps 40-50 clamps may be required for achieving a particular coiffure.
There is therefore a need for a one-piece device which, once the operator has isolated the strands of hair, clamps to the hair strands by simply snap-locking the device on the strands by simple finger pressure. To facilitate hair dressing operations, such as frosting or streaking, there is also a need for a hair styling device which maintains different locks of hair strands separated by supporting each lock diametrically outwardly from a person's scalp.